everything is weird and I don't want it to stop
by Malvolia
Summary: Ben and Bea are serious about competition of all sorts, from verbal sparring to laser tag. How long can that last? In which they both cheat at games, misinterpret casual comments, and talk things out without angst. Set in the Nothing Much to Do universe, and prompted by this picture on Harriet Maire's Tumblr: harriettstella . tumblr . com/image/103584308577


"Two words: laser tag."

Beatrice Duke closed her locker door to reveal the animated face of Benedick Hobbes, her...well, her boyfriend. (Still weird. Good weird. But weird.)

"Technically, that's two _more_ words, since 'two words' are in themselves two words."

"Laser," he repeated, "tag." His hands marked a space in the air for each word.

She imitated his gesture back. "What about it?"

"That's what we're doing Friday night. If you agree," he added hurriedly, "I just think you should because it'd be brilliant. Also, I overheard Claudio mention he wanted to get the group together for laser tag after finals, and I want a chance to hone our tactics so we can crush them like insects."

"I didn't think you could crush somebody with a laser."

"True, you can't. Let's hone our tactics so we can explode them. Still like insects, I refuse to give up that bit."

"Not even if I remind you that my nickname is a homonym for an insect and express slight concern over jumping into an aggressive interaction so soon after we've stopped several years of them?"

"Explode them like a TARDIS in a temporal loop."

She pushed to her tiptoes and kissed him quickly on the cheek. "You are such a nerd."

He grinned. "I love you, too. Really, though, Bea, I don't think a round of laser tag is going to cause any feuds to reopen. 'Communication,' remember? We're aces at that now."

She conceded the point with a nod.

"So, Friday, then? Seven o'clock at Laserforce? With pizza featuring into the evening at some point?"

"Just as long as there aren't olives. I may like _you_, but I still don't like non-metaphorical olives."

* * *

><p>"I wish I could've afforded the exclusive use package," Ben said as he pulled his laser tag armor on over his head. "Then we could be playing the <em>10 Things I Hate About You<em> way."

Bea laughed. "I should be surprised that you've seen that movie, but knowing the special place in your heart for sharp-tongued girls, I'm not."

"Your tongue's not all that sharp," he said, too innocently, and she kicked at his shoe.

"They were playing paintball, not laser tag."

"Yeah, but making out in the dark surrounded by futuristic gadgetry and techno music sounds way more fun than making out in a pile of hay."

"Hay is much too scratchy," agreed Bea. "Alas for you not having the $400 to spare."

"You'll just have to stick with me until I become fabulously wealthy."

"At the rate you're going so far, that could take the rest of your life," she quipped.

Ben became very interested in his armor clasps at the same time Bea felt it was a little early in the relationship to have broached the subject of longevity. But an image flashed into her head of her and Ben at eighty, shooing teenagers out of the way with their canes as they shuffled into the laser tag arena.

Stranger things had happened.

* * *

><p>With all the geeking out he had been doing over the A.I. in the Laserforce arena, how you could play a whole game without ever having to resort to shooting your friends, Ben spent very little time aiming for the targets interspersed throughout the room. He did make dramatic attempts to avoid the shots fired from the robots, but after almost knocking over a young girl as he finished up an awkward barrel roll, he stopped even doing that. He let Bea help him up, his eyes dancing almost as much as the brightly-colored lights flickering over his face.<p>

"Pistols at five paces?" he asked, spinning around and stalking away before she could answer. Which really was just asking to be shot the second he turned around. (Sooner, even, but Bea preferred to look her victims in the eyes.)

She got off the first shot, and then it was a no-holds-barred shootout, space-Western style, and Bea learned that Ben had no qualms about using human shields. She shot at least five other players in aiming at him. He tried to hide behind kids, too, which she hoped was just for a joke, because had he _seen_ himself lately? She was irritated and amused simultaneously, and considered that she should invest some time in finding a better word for that particular emotion, because Ben was really good at eliciting it.

Back against a barrel, taking cover to give herself a second to breathe, she felt her stomach growling. She stuck her head up and saw Ben slinking directly across the arena towards her position.

"Pizza break after this game?" she called out.

He paused to consider, and she took aim and shot him square in the chest.

"Fair Beatrice, I am slain!" he cried dramatically, reeling towards her as she jumped up and continued firing shot after shot without compunction. He flung himself against her like a dying man, draping his arms over her shoulders. "A break sounds great," he said conversationally, and an electronic blaster sound came from behind Bea.

"Did you just shoot me in the back?" she asked, hoisting him off her.

"You shot me while distracting me with talk of pizza!" he countered, snatching her blaster. She jumped for it, but he was holding both blasters high above her and grinning smugly. "Let's just say I won this round and call it good."

"The round isn't over yet." She darted her fingers at his midsection and he leapt backwards. A series of darting and leaping brought them to a corner behind a barricade, where Bea heartlessly pursued her advantage and tickled him until, after several valiant moments of merely flailing his elbows around, Ben dropped to his knees and lowered both blasters to the floor.

"Okay, you asked for it." He began flapping his hands towards her in classic mock-girl-fight manner, and she brought her own flapping hands up against his until they collapsed into completely childish giggling. Grasping hands, they leaned against the wall to catch their breath.

"Your hands are sweaty," she lied.

"Yours are sweatier," he said. "It's like trying to hold a pair of goldfish."

She ran her middle fingers lightly along the inside of his palms, and he immediately released her and rubbed his hands against his shirt.

This was her life now. Was this really what it was supposed to be like? She'd seen a lot of other couples over the years, but they had all been way too cute, like Claudio and Hero, or way too physical, like Meg and Robbie. None of them had been this...competitive. It seemed right, for her and Ben. She couldn't imagine stomaching any other kind of relationship, and she was pretty sure he felt the same way. Maybe he was thinking the same thing.

"You know, it might not take _that_ long."

Or maybe not the same thing.

"The pizza?" she asked, completely confused.

He ran a hand through his hair. "No, the, um...the $400. I mean, I don't really need to be _fabulously _wealthy to come up with $400."

She stared at him blankly, rifling through mental flashcards of their conversations of the evening to try to come up with what on earth he was talking about.

"But, I mean, science is my thing. And that's...that can be pretty lucrative, once university is over with...so...I mean, I'm not going to end up a pauper, I'll be able to swing $400 quickly enough. Not that there are really any super-strict rules about us having to have this place to ourselves before we could…."

Her brain helpfully flashed the image of her and Ben as octogenarian laser taggers. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "Oh, Ben, no, I...I don't even care about that. You could make crap pay forever, if you were happy with whatever you were doing."

"You sure? You got pretty quiet back there."

"Yeah, um…." She was thankful to be in a dimly lit corner, as she wasn't keen on Ben seeing the natural color of her face just at the moment. "It's the, uh, the other part."

It was Ben's turn to stare blankly. "Other part?"

"The 'rest of your life' part. Too much, too soon." She tried to laugh nonchalantly, which turned out a complete failure, but his face split into one of those gigantic grins of his.

"Oh, that!" he said. "No worries there, love."

"None?"

"Not a one." His eyebrows furrowed. "You're not having second thoughts on us already, are you?"

She shrugged and shook her head at the same time. "Doesn't...doesn't it ever worry you that we like arguing with and winning against each other so much? Maybe it's fine for now, but over the long run, mightn't that be a bit, I don't know...unsustainable?"

"Not at all. We only argue about inconsequential things, really. We're good at talking it out when it actually matters, and when it doesn't, it's good fun."

"I seem to recall a few times we've disagreed about what things actually matter. To tea, or not to tea? Are flamingoes majestic, or gangly? Tenth Doctor, or 11th? Olives, or..."

There was a clacking noise of armor meeting as Ben pulled her over and kissed her.

"Sometimes that is the only way to stop your mouth," he said.

"As if yours isn't ever in need of stopping."

"In that particular fashion, it very much is. It's my favorite way to be _not_ talking."

They not-talked again.

"To return to the issue at hand," said Ben, "it's kind of hot when you beat me at stuff. I like having a talented girlfriend who keeps me on my toes."

"More like a talented boyfriend who keeps me on mine," she joked, throwing her head back to emphasize the upward tilt of her neck.

"Well, we meet in the middle a fair amount, too," he added, as she reached up and he leaned down simultaneously.

"Mmm," she hummed appreciatively a few seconds later. "We're both pretty talented."

"Amazingly talented."

"And now that I'm thinking about it, I've noticed we seem to be arguing less in public now. When there are other people around, it's more us vs. the world."

"The world doesn't stand a chance."

"Exploded," she returned. "Just like how next Saturday we'll have each other's backs when we're exploding everybody else."

"Perhaps literally back-to-back, like Eleven and River? After all, you are..."

"Wow, that is only by a few months, will you never let that go? Anyway, the Doctor was really the older one all the time."

"Whatever you say, Mrs. Robinson."

She shook her head. "I hate you."

He smiled. "No, you don't."

No, she didn't.

The best kind of weird.


End file.
